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Feb 8, 2014 11:22
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That seems 100% par for the uk rail course.
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Feb 8, 2014 11:39
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I might have missed it, but Amtrak is apparently getting some new locomotives for the Northeast Corridor runs.
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Feb 8, 2014 15:27
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Axeman Jim posted:The only remaining railway to Cornwall (after two other routes were closed in the 1960s) has now been washed out and about 700,000 people no longer have a rail link to London. A couple of years ago, a proposal was raised to re-open one of the other routes (about half of which still exists as a heritage line), but it was deemed "too expensive" at £100 million. Well you engineers out there might want to hazard a guess of what the repair bill at Dawlish will be, and it seems odd to be spending 20 Billion on a high-speed line to Birmingham when 100m to build a line to the South West that won't get closed every time the wind picks up is "too expensive." But hey, British Railway planning. Oh, Dr. Beeching! Edit: One of our neighbors seems like they might be cool. You may have to up the brightness to see it properly, Sonoma County this morning is under a British layer of weather. 
ChickenOfTomorrow fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 17:31
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:I might have missed it, but Amtrak is apparently getting some new locomotives for the Northeast Corridor runs. I wish we had more electrified rail lines here. The NEC is so cool and yet nearly all the other commuter rail services in the US use diesel. I know it's less expensive than just putting up catenary and ordering new rolling stock but electric rail is badass and I love seeing sparks fly off the pantograph/third rail 
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Feb 8, 2014 18:08
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:I might have missed it, but Amtrak is apparently getting some new locomotives for the Northeast Corridor runs. I'm glad we got all these locomotives just a few years before the FRA totally changes their crash safety guidelines to be more in line with the rest of the world. These are going to be obsolete before we even know what hit us.
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Feb 8, 2014 21:58
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FISHMANPET posted:I'm glad we got all these locomotives just a few years before the FRA totally changes their crash safety guidelines to be more in line with the rest of the world. These are going to be obsolete before we even know what hit us. I dunno, one of the key features of the ACS-64 over the ES-64 appears to be that it has better safety features (crumple zones and rollbar cages). If the ES-64 is good enough for most of the EU, then I can't see how the US stepping into line will result in the ACS-64 not being safe enough.
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Feb 8, 2014 22:15
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Zeether posted:I wish we had more electrified rail lines here. The NEC is so cool and yet nearly all the other commuter rail services in the US use diesel. I know it's less expensive than just putting up catenary and ordering new rolling stock but electric rail is badass and I love seeing sparks fly off the pantograph/third rail The irony being that if CAHSR has the same effect that Acela had on the NEC, it will essentially be immediately overcrowded with all the regional/HSR trains. Guess thats a better problem to have then, you know, it never getting built.
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Feb 8, 2014 22:39
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Zeether posted:I wish we had more electrified rail lines here. The NEC is so cool and yet nearly all the other commuter rail services in the US use diesel. I know it's less expensive than just putting up catenary and ordering new rolling stock but electric rail is badass and I love seeing sparks fly off the pantograph/third rail loving seriously. I honestly don't understand how, in the Bay Area of all places, CalTrain still runs ancient (What I assume are) F-40 locomotives when they only run from SFO to Gilroy. edit: hah so after some reading they ARE going to electrify CalTrain, but only from SFO to San Jose. I guess the dirty peasants to the south get the privilege of listening to the thrashing of the F-40's still.
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Feb 8, 2014 23:13
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SybilVimes posted:I dunno, one of the key features of the ACS-64 over the ES-64 appears to be that it has better safety features (crumple zones and rollbar cages). If the ES-64 is good enough for most of the EU, then I can't see how the US stepping into line will result in the ACS-64 not being safe enough. The problem is that our trains are too safe. No trains in the world are built as heavily as our trains our, and by 2017 the FRA is going to change rules to be more in line with the rest of the world. This will result in trains that are much ligher, making them cheaper to buy and cheaper to run. We can't buy trains off the shelf because nobody builds trains for our market, they have to be custom engineered. This means every time we buy a trainset, there are only a handful of bidders. We lose out on economies of scale. American trains are built with the assumption that they will crash head on into freight trains, which isn't a very common occurrence. Besides, we don't mandate that cars survive impacts with solid objects or planes remain intact when they crash into the ground. Once we can run more standard rail vehicles, these sprinters will quickly be seen as expensive, overweight, and uneconomical to run.
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Feb 8, 2014 23:22
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Florida had one chance at an electrified high speed line and it got shot down by Rick Scott. So basically we're stuck with diesels, including 4 diesel railcars on Tri-Rail, unless someone tries to bring back the high speed rail proposal when a new governor gets elected or something. I didn't even know Tri-Rail got those diesel railcars until I looked on Wikipedia because the last I heard they were testing one in Colorado Railcar livery on the line. Zeether fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Feb 9, 2014 |
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Feb 9, 2014 06:42
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FISHMANPET posted:No trains in the world are built as heavily as our trains I read somewhere that European trains aren't built for crash-resistance as much because they have better signaling systems for reducing crashes in the first place. Is this true? What does "better" consist of? I'm pretty new to being interested in trains and don't know much, but I think the ACS 64s are kind of adorable  With that twin-cab flat-"face" design they reminded me of a lot of those European locomotives, and it turns out the design is in fact based in Siemens' Euro Sprinter. Is there some catchall name for that body style?
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Feb 9, 2014 07:53
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That's basically correct, European trains safety comes from avoiding collisions, American train safety comes from surviving collisions. For example, the ACS-64 is 97 tons and the 86-87 tons. Most of that is probably structural, to give the locomotive more buff strength. Basically they want the locotomotive to just bounce off of whatever it hits (the presumed alternative being the entire trainset gets flattened like a pop can). I believe rail cars are also heavier for this same reason. Here's an interesting article, even though it's from 2007 I think it gives a pretty good picture: https://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html And here's an article about the FRA changing the rules: http://nextcity.org/theworks/entry/modern-european-train-designs-american-tracks-2015-fra I guess it's 2015 the regs change, which makes the ACS even sillier (though, probably nobody knew that the changes would happen when the ACS was ordered).
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Feb 9, 2014 08:07
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Zeether posted:Florida had one chance at an electrified high speed line and it got shot down by Rick Scott. So basically we're stuck with diesels, including 4 diesel railcars on Tri-Rail, unless someone tries to bring back the high speed rail proposal when a new governor gets elected or something. Thank gently caress. The proposals for MickeyRail or whatever the hell it was called were basically a legal way to shovel money out of the state budget and into the Disney corporation. Federal funds were available for initial construction of the first segment from Tampa to Orlando, but it had wildly optimistic ridership numbers to make the red ink stop dripping off the proposal, and in the long term, would have ended up as a Florida State Amtrak. It would have been like getting a free Puppy. Great, it was free, but now it's pissing on my carpets and the vet bills are piling up. FEC does have the All Aboard Florida project coming up, which will do what the FHSR segment from Miami to Orlando would have done, but is privately funded.
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Feb 9, 2014 14:20
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MrYenko posted:FEC does have the All Aboard Florida project coming up, which will do what the FHSR segment from Miami to Orlando would have done, but is privately funded. FEC barely has the capacity to meet their needs now so this is pretty crazy. Maybe they're getting federal/state dollars to double track all the way to Jacksonville out of this.
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Feb 9, 2014 20:08
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With the FRA mandating lighter locomotives, does that also mean lower power and thus shorter trains? In other words, will the new regulations mean trains cant haul as much and thus more trains on the track? Just how common are head on collisions anyways?
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Feb 9, 2014 23:26
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They're not mandating they be lighter, they're just no longer mandating that passenger trains be able to withstand impact of 1 million pounds of force. Freight trains will continue to be freight trains, and passenger trains will become lighter and faster (because they were at this magical tipping point where the locomotives just kept getting heavier and heavier just to haul themselves). There's also the possibility of Multiple Units, which means you can run a rail line without needing an entire separate locomotive.
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Feb 9, 2014 23:47
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MrYenko posted:but it had wildly optimistic ridership numbers to make the red ink stop dripping off the proposal, and in the long term, would have ended up as a Florida State Amtrak. I guess thats what Floridians get for electing Rick Scott and just being Florida residents in general. Cygni fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Feb 10, 2014 |
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Feb 10, 2014 08:06
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Axeman Jim wrote some lovely posts in the PYF Obsolete Technology thread about crap British trains: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3495621&userid=170374
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Feb 10, 2014 20:44
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I had no idea that British Rail produced so many abortions. It's like a comedy of errors. He even continued it in Ireland. "Bulleid developed two prototype peat-burning locomotives, one a converted coal-fired traditional steam locomotive and the other, CC1, new and fully enclosed, along the lines of the Leader design. CIÉ did not adopt peat-fired traction for widespread use."
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Feb 11, 2014 04:25
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I thought American railroads did some boneheaded moves, but some of that stuff.... is holy gently caress what the hell did they smoke territory.
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Feb 11, 2014 04:34
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The British are astonishingly bad at trains, and one needs to look no further than the Tube, or the mangled patchwork of Brunel-era design and depressing pre-modern bodgings that make up the majority of the UK rail network.
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Feb 11, 2014 17:09
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I want to say back the gently caress off because they invented railways and there was a reasonable amount of trial-and-error involved, but yeah, that excuse stopped being valid about 1860.
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Feb 11, 2014 18:27
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I watched The Railway: Keeping Britain on Track and in one episode there was a Pacer being used to train people. When it got to opening the doors the doors got stuck and the guy training the new recruits had to fix them. Can't believe they still operate those.
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Feb 11, 2014 18:33
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Holy gently caress at the BR 124... It had a loving stick shift, connected to up to 16 clutches and transmissions. I want to see a video of this thing in action.
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Feb 11, 2014 20:08
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Sure, sure, but spend some time ogling an InterCity 125 with that swallow paint job and then try and tell me the British never made one good train. Pacers, though. Riding a Pacer to Leamington Spa during one winter visit made me glad I left the UK before I had to commute on post-privatization regional lines. The inhuman squeal the thing makes going around corners, because it's literally grinding at the rails. [IMG-WEEPING ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL] ChickenOfTomorrow fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 21:19
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I can't find a single video of a 124 in action on Youtube. There is a preserved example of a sister class, the 126, which had the same transmission but only 3 cars per train and 4 engines in total. You can experience the noise, rattling and plentiful blue smoke here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhOoyFEvsGE Comedy gear change at 3:34. You'll notice that the 126 has a corridor connection at only one end. The idea was that two 3-car units would couple back-to-back, allowing passengers to move throughout a 6-car train. Of course what usually happened is that they were coupled any old how, frequently with the two non-corridor ends facing each other instead, combining cramped cabs from which the driver couldn't see anything with passengers being unable to move around the train.
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Feb 11, 2014 21:21
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I actually had a trip on a class 153 Sprinter at the weekend, which were made from left over bits of Leyland National buses. It was pretty bad.
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Feb 11, 2014 23:01
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Captain Postal posted:I want to say back the gently caress off because they invented railways and there was a reasonable amount of trial-and-error involved, but yeah, that excuse stopped being valid about 1860. Wasn't Brunel to English railroads as to what Vanderbilt's/ Durant/Scott to the American rails? (Minus the whole scandals)
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Feb 11, 2014 23:20
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Brunel was probably the greatest engineer of his era.
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Feb 11, 2014 23:56
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:Sure, sure, but spend some time ogling an InterCity 125 with that swallow paint job and then try and tell me the British never made one good train. I had plenty of trips to Reading and beyond to experience the unique musk of the IC125's resistor banks under heavy braking. Every stop the things smell like a 1950s world's faire exhibit make entirely of Bakelite being set ablaze.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:55
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sincx fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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Feb 12, 2014 04:05
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sincx posted:That "thing" looks and sounds like 3 ratty school buses from 1975 stuck together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpK33DJyz7w Listen to that idle.
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Feb 12, 2014 07:13
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:
The really weird thing is that, unintentionally, for a while, some of the ones around Sheffield/Leeds were actually incredibly comfortable. One of the batches of the hateful things somehow ended up with absurdly deeply padded seats, like they'd decided to refurbish them by trawling through grandma's collection of old sofas, and they were put together badly enough that after a little while the seat backs bent so much that they turned into something resembling those business class reclining airline seats, except narrower. Of course, you needed earplugs on the them more than you would on an aircraft, but the seats were so nice that all the bouncing around actually became sort of relaxing. Then they 'fixed' them by taking those out and replacing them with different seats, that had hard plastic backs and a little recess for anyone over about 5ft tall to squeeze their legs into so that they could have pain inflicted on them from a whole variety of new, exciting angles. Oh well.
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Feb 12, 2014 09:02
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The '124 wasn't as bad as many are portraying it, I rode on it several times to get to places on the west coast, and it was always a step up from the 108 or very rarely 101 that got me to York to change onto the Trans Pennine. But at the time the gearboxes would have been relatively new and weren't horrible rattle-buckets yet. The switch to sprinters & pacers was a huge step down in comfort and a huge step up in horrible noise.
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Feb 12, 2014 13:29
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Just wanted to make sure everyone got a chance to see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86PUB4u2s2A
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Feb 12, 2014 15:52
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Ohio derailment coverage  for languagehttp://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f51_1392395809
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Feb 15, 2014 04:40
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bisticles posted:Just wanted to make sure everyone got a chance to see this: Which must be followed by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WXQL_pJc2I.
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Feb 15, 2014 20:28
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I just happened to be looking through some train searches and found this: an article on armored trains! Holy poo poo, there were some really radical stuff that people came up with. I can't see how any sane person could resist wanting to drive one of these. If only they were here in the US and were put on special rail tour trains, like a military version of the Polar Express...imagine it.  ed: Actually, Darkroastedblend has an index to their train-related stuff: http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/01/category-trains.html Pigsfeet on Rye fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 15, 2014 23:30
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Armored trains. The "Krajina Express":  That is not just an M18 turret, that's a whole Hellcat.   
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Feb 16, 2014 17:58
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